


Meteorology

by tormalyne



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-05
Updated: 2013-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-03 13:19:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1070913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tormalyne/pseuds/tormalyne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life and the weather. Kise Ryouta becomes his own storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Meteorology

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to half_sleeping for a much-needed beta!

This is how it starts:

The wind is blowing, whistles a hollow sound and teases his hair into his face. It’s getting long, but his sister says that’ll increase his appeal, so he hasn’t cut it. He’s been thinking about joining the soccer club, might have to cut it for that, but Tanaka is one of the team’s best players and he wasn't that impressive in P.E.; it’d be wasted effort, and at least the modeling is something to eat up his time.

The hours pass like time's gone liquid and thick, dragging on and on. There’s classes, modeling, his sisters’ fussing, clubs that never work out. It’s like everything’s covered in a clinging layer of murky grey fog and he sleepwalks through it all, listening to the hum of the wind and waiting for something to shock him out of his daze.

His footsteps echo down the school’s dull halls and the faces lining the walls all smile exactly the same smile: admiring, awed – greedy. It’s like passing rows of paper dolls, seeing the same look in all the coyly lowered pairs of dark-lined eyes. Every stylish hairstyle is straight out of this month’s _Nicola_ ; soft, shining waves and asymmetrical bangs, maybe the occasional adventurous slash of pixie-cut edges, sometimes clipped back or tied up, but all cute and appealing and blurring together like a picture photocopied too many times.

He remembers their names because it’s important to treat his fans well, even if he doesn’t particularly like or dislike them. A model depends on his fans for success; you can’t get anywhere in the business, his manager says, if you don’t at least realize that, so he commits every name to memory, learns every paper doll face. Rinko and Yuri, Akane and Mei, the girls who march right up to his desk with their skirts rolled up and the ones who have to be pushed into his path by a giggling crowd of friends – he smiles back at all of them, gets better about remembering all the meaningless details they like to talk about, and goes on dates with anyone who asks. They all know it doesn’t mean anything, but they think he’s a gentleman, charming, a prince, and they thank him for it. He knows better than to tell them it’s really just another way to pass some time.

Basketball comes out of nowhere, a bolt that cuts through the fog, a blow to the back of his head that leaves him blinking back little bursts of light. For a long time after, there’s a high, bright ringing in his ears that lasts even after the pain from Aominecchi’s stray ball fades away.

It’s like a flash fire whipped up by a storm wind into a blaze, and Aominecchi is the storm. He’s electrified by the thunder, the quicksilver flash of Aominecchi pelting down the court. He watches Aominecchi sink shot after impossible shot and would swear his heart skips a beat. The sound of the ball against the backboard again and again drowns out the wind – he’s too caught up in chasing after Aominecchi and never reaching to notice that the wind has quieted and gone.

He has no time to remember idle thoughts about cutting his hair, to worry about things like his image or increasing his appeal, not when it’s taking everything he has to catch up on all those years of basketball he’s missed; everyone else has a head start, but that just means he actually has to give it his all for the first time. He forgets about his hair entirely, too caught up in the chase, but that’s fine. He doesn’t want to waste any time. Something like these endless days of laughter under clear skies – he knows a thing like that won’t last forever, and he has better things to care about while it does.

It has to happen eventually: Aominecchi’s quicksilver wind blows itself too hard and becomes not a storm, but a typhoon, brings with it thunderous clouds and an endless deluge. Aominecchi sinks and the rest of them get dragged down with him, pulled under without even noticing the flood of his talent rising up all around. They still win games, but it’s too easy, too dull. They barely have to try. The laughter turns echoing, waterlogged and muted.

In the quiet, he begins to remember what it is to be bored, piece by piece. Aominecchi stops smiling when they win, stops coming to practice, stops showing up for their one on ones. He thinks that if he could manage it, Aominecchi’d freeze time and let everyone else pass him by, turn into equal matches for him so they could put up a fight – but there’s no one who can. Other teams look at Aominecchi and see a monster. They give up before the whistle even blows.

He blooms into a monster, too. What was impossible becomes inevitable; if he keeps going like this, growing like everyone else, he won’t be able to help catching up to a target that’s doing all it can to stand still. This dream will end. Maybe he should start skipping practice, too. Wouldn’t it be better to stay dreaming than wake up to find he’s never really burned away that fog?

The sound of the ball pounding the floor, the squeak of his teammates’ sneakers, the crowd roaring in the stands – it all starts to fade. Everything’s changing, that’s obvious, but he doesn’t know what to do. He can try turning overwhelming victory into another game, but it doesn’t matter. When they walk onto the court, there’s only silence, heavy and thick with malaise. That distant, clear ringing dies away.

The wind is blowing again.

–--

This is how it goes:

Kaijou scouts him and it’s as easy as that. No grueling studying, no entrance exam, no need for audition tapes to secure a spot on his new team. All he has to do is show up to school the first day and the rest will take care of itself. That’s what it means to be a monster, he’d guess, if he weren’t so disinterested in the whole process. Kaijou will let him take the time off for his modeling and that’s enough to get him to say yes.

He smiles politely at the coach as he’s handed his acceptance forms to fill out, nods along when the man promises their team will be strong even though it’s a stupid, pointless thing to say. Of course Kaijou has a strong basketball club; none of the Generation of Miracles are going to any second rate school.

He spends the summer flitting from one shoot to another like a leaf blown by the breeze. All the photos blend together: he wears what he’s given, smiles how he’s told, and his stylist tells him he’s never looked better, never had more appeal. There’s something about him, she says, that gives all his shots a certain quality that hadn’t been there before. Something aloof and untouchable, more mature. It’s that distant look in his eyes. Girls like that, she says. They want him to be unreachable on the pages of magazines, hung up on their walls and safe as the object of their school girl affections.

The modeling is tiring and not that interesting, but that’s okay. He has a lot of free time to kill now that he’s not practicing for basketball club every day.

Summer ends. The wind blows a little harder, drowns out the cicadas’ sighs. His sisters make him try on his new uniform for them, coo over his reflection in the mirror, tell him he looks so grown up with a new piercing in his ear.

When he gets there, Kaijou isn’t all that different from Teikou. Different shade of blue, different people, but the same smiling paper doll faces lining the halls.

He likes his new team as much as he likes anything, nowadays. The grumpy captain going on about _experience this and respect your seniors that_ is kind of annoying, but at least Kasamatsu’s not smiling that same ingratiating smile. At least that’s a change.

Even so, he shows up the next day with an apology on his lips that no one really believes he means, and not even Kasamatsu points out the insincerity behind it. It’s not like he’s that good of an actor; they just want him to play, to get them the win. Kaijou really isn’t so different from Teikou, after all.

His new team wants the monster to play for them when they’re going against all the other monsters this year, and he doesn’t mind. Fight monsters with monsters, right? It makes sense and it’s convenient, since that’s what he wants, too. 

Then along comes Kurokocchi, who will never be a monster like them but wants to play at monster slaying with his new knight all the same. He doesn’t mind that, either. He’s been skipping practice more and more, letting his manager book him for more shoots. He could use a little break in the tedium, and even if Kagami Taiga can’t drag him down to Kurokocchi’s level, well, at least it might be kind of fun to see him try.

He doesn’t get dragged down, but Kagami just barely learns something about climbing up to his level instead – and much more about slaying monsters. Kagami’s not enough by himself, not yet, but there’s Kurokocchi to shore up all his weak points while he grows into a monster himself.

The force of Kurokocchi’s passes and Kagami’s last, soaring dunk echoes so loudly that for a moment, he can’t hear anything – not the final whistle or that constant, distant wind. And then, for just a second, he hears something high and ringing, and thinks _oh, I remember that_ – but it’s gone again, swallowed up by the disbelieving silence of the watching crowd.

He loses the game and he’s too stunned to notice that the wind’s lost its hollow sound.

–--

This is how it ends:

He starts going to every practice, goes out of his way to watch games whether or not he can drag Kasamatsu-senpai along. His manager is disappointed that he’s turning down jobs when he’s got such good momentum going, but also seems a little relieved. It’s nice to see him excited about something again, he overhears her tell his stylist while he’s waiting for an outfit change. He’s young, he should be doing stupid things, having fun and chasing impossible dreams. There’s still plenty of time for him to be a brat before he has to grow up, before the world makes him figure out who he wants to be.

He’s not really sure that’s it. Midorimacchi had said the same thing, but he’s still who he was two weeks ago when he’d lost the practice match to Seirin. He doesn’t think he’s changed. It’s not like anyone wakes up one morning and has turned into someone completely new. There’s no magic switch to flip, no cocoon to burst from, no shell to crack.

It’s just that maybe, just maybe, he can kind of see that Kasamatsu-senpai’s got a point. He doesn’t really get what the point is, not yet – with all their experience, he’s still better at basketball than any senior on the team. Still, that thing about revenge, well, he kind of likes how that sounds.

It wouldn’t be so bad to be Kaijou’s Kise when he gets around to paying the favor back.

He’s left behind Teikou where he was one of many monsters, let his mom fold up his jersey and stick it in a cardboard box of keepsakes. He’ll never wear it again; it’s too small now, tight around his armpits after he’s shot up in height in what feels like a week. That’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Maybe it’s not overnight, but in the end, he has shed a skin and turned into someone new.

That’s okay, too. Hasn’t he been playing catch up long enough?

Inter High comes; before the game, he tells the coach and Kasamatsu-senpai that he wants to do the impossible, wants to try copying Aominecchi. He’s been thinking about it a lot, lately, about how he’s pretty sure he can. About how he’s always known, deep down, that he really always could. After all, he’s one of the monsters, too. Aominecchi’s had almost a year to dig in and get himself nowhere. It’s about time someone knocked him back into gear.

It’s not like he hadn’t seen it coming even from that first day of being knocked in the head, watching Aominecchi’s formless shots in the gym; he’s always known he can copy anyone if he works at it enough. It’s just that it’d been fun having Aominecchi out ahead of him, having all of them ahead, too far and out of his reach, amazing and inimitable – but some dreams have to end.

He can’t afford to wait for someone else to get Aominecchi to start moving again. Not when Aominecchi blew past Kurokocchi and Kagamicchi and it barely made a dent, when Aominecchi’s still so determined to stand still, to bury himself deeper and deeper until he can’t be moved at all.

He can’t afford to wait any longer when he has a team he likes playing for, likes playing with. A team that’s counting on him.

Hasn’t he given Aominecchi more than enough time to get going again?

But in the end, it’s not enough. All those missed practices, all those years before he even knew he’d want to know how to dribble a ball – skill isn’t enough when they all add up. All the copying in the world doesn’t matter when his calves start to tremble, when he thinks he won’t make the basket because he can feel his legs wanting to give out on him.

He passes, and the game’s over just like that. All because he trusted the outcome to someone else – but even though they’ve lost, it’s not a choice he can regret.

He finally gets it, what Kasamatsu-senpai’d meant at that first practice. Experience and will, the hard work of his seniors before him. He really can’t regret trusting in that. It’s not what Aominecchi would have done, but even losing, he’d rather be himself instead.

When the final whistle blows, when he’s held up by his captain’s sturdy shoulders and steady arm, surrounded by his teammates who believe so whole heartedly in him, there’s no space for listening for the wind.

–--

This is how it begins again:

He practices and practices and practices until everything hurts, heads home and ices his legs, lies in bed and bears it when even that doesn’t get rid of the dull pain. The ache’s always gone the next morning, so he practices some more. A little pain isn’t so bad. It’s better than losing again.

He runs on the weekends and before morning practice, sometimes in the evenings before dinner, too. His agency provides a gym membership he’s never bothered to use, but he starts now, lifting weights after shoots. His arms burn and feel like wet noodles, he’s panting for breath and has a cramp in his side, thinks he won’t be able to manage the next set of reps – but he doesn’t stop. It’s still better than losing again.

It gets him home later than his mom would really like, but he’s serious about this now. She doesn’t argue about it after the first time, when he can’t explain why it matters so much except that he really, really doesn’t want to lose, can’t stand to see his team lose again.

(She sighs, but she’s smiling, looks kind of like his manager had when he’d seen her in the mirror. His sisters have been going around with that same look, too, but he’s too busy to pay attention to that.)

The Inter High is over; the Winter Cup has yet to come. If he’s lucky, it’s enough time to get a little stronger. It won’t be too much more, not with so little time, but it doesn’t have to be any more than enough strength to win.

He runs up against Haizaki like the wind dashing against a cliff, and for a second, on his knees on the ground, staring up at Haizaki’s sneering face, it’s the same – jagged and insurmountable, like being dragged back to when he was thirteen and couldn’t win no matter how hard or how often he tried.

He’s not thirteen any more, though. He’s woken up, stopped dreaming, stopped thinking it’d be boring unless he held back that last little bit. Right now, right in front of him, there’s something more important than dreams of always chasing someone’s back.

He stands up, takes one step, gathers himself with his team at his back. This time, he’s not chasing anyone. He’s had years to watch, to see how Midorimacchi’s shots sail across the entire court, how Murasakibaracchi extends his reach, how Akashicchi watches for his opponent’s telltale move. This time, he’s not content just gaining on all those faraway backs. He’s aiming for an upset, to overtake, eclipse.

He becomes his own storm, his own lightning, his own thunder and gale force wind, blows Haizaki back like he’s nothing – Haizaki is nothing, just a pale imitation of what he knows he can do. He has his sights set on something so much higher than a middle school grudge. If he’s Kaijou’s Kise, then there’s something much more important that he has to reach.

To reach for that height, a little more pain doesn’t matter. His chance for payback comes and Kagamicchi and Kurokocchi have slain monsters just as terrifying as him. But he’s going to take Kaijou to the top. He’s going to play with Kaijou until the end. He swears it, counting down the minutes until the coach will put him back in, while he watches his team struggle and fight tooth and nail for every point.

This time, he doesn’t need anyone to tell him not to give up until the bitter end. Why have limits if he’s not going to surpass them? If he’s a monster, he’ll be the worst of them all.

And in the end, he doesn’t lose. Kagamicchi and Kurokocchi can’t stop him, even when his legs are shaking, when he can barely stand. He doesn’t lose, but Kaijou does, and what does it matter that he hasn’t lost? What does it matter when he’s the ace, when this was Kasamatsu-senpai, Moriyama-senpai, Kobori-senpai’s last chance?

He has next year, but it won’t be the same team. He won’t ever be quite the same person again, will wake up tomorrow and have shed another skin. He won’t be this Kaijou’s Kise, this Kaijou’s ace. He wanted to win with this team, this year. More than anything, he wanted to win for them.

He’s Kaijou’s Kise Ryouta. This is the team he loves.

There’s no time to listen for the wind, and he wouldn’t hear it anyway. It hurts. It’s painful, a razor, unfair ache, but Kasamatsu-senpai said it, didn’t he? That’s just how it is.

It’s already time to start thinking about next year’s revenge.


End file.
